So instead of refactoring, they hacked around it, and now the law is that much harder to read.
Law making and programming are quite similar in some ways, and share some pathologies.
Law making and programming are quite similar in some ways, and share some pathologies.
Seems more sensible and less error prone than using "fish, mollusks..." everywhere and doing a ctrl+f and adding a ", bees" everywhere. Doing the ctrl+f approach would be the hack IMO. I guess they could have changed the variable name as well but legal documents probably aren't written in IntelliJ or some other tool where you can confidently believe that you changed every occurrence. Plus, you don't have compiler warnings!
Unless I'm misunderstanding something or your comment...
It's a landmine for future developers who want to parachute in, understand what is happening, make a fix, and jetpack out again.